Gods of Venus and Other Stories

Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907 - 1975) was an American writer and artist. He achieved notoriety in the years following World War II as the author of controversial stories that were printed in science fiction magazines (primarily Amazing Stories), in which he claimed that he had had personal experience of a sinister, ancient civilization that harbored fantastic technology in caverns under the earth. The controversy stemmed from the claim by Shaver and his editor and publisher Ray Palmer, that Shaver's writings, while presented in the guise of fiction, were fundamentally true. Shaver's stories were promoted by Ray Palmer as The Shaver Mystery. During the last decades of his life, Shaver devoted himself to rock books-stones that he believed had been created by the advanced ancient races and embedded with legible pictures and texts. He produced paintings based on the rock images and photographed the rock books extensively, as well as writing about them. Posthumously, Shaver has gained a reputation as an artist and his paintings and photos have been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.